Tuesday, April 07, 2009

Dramatic footage obtained by the Guardian shows that the man who died at last week's G20 protests in London was attacked from behind and thrown to the ground by a baton–wielding police officer in riot gear.

10 comments:

dearieme
said...

Very true. The next thing to find out is whether that copper was acting as a freelance yob or whether he'd been ordered to clear the poor chap out of the way. Indeed, had he been trained to treat passers-by like that? Happily, with a brand new boss at the Met there must be a chance of getting to the truth since any high-level blame can be assigned to Blair & Blair.

Colour me heartless but I have never seen such a fuss made over nothing. I almost wish I had taped the police officer who clambered under an unstable double decker bus to hold my mum's hand as she lay dying under it so I could send it to the Guardian and watch them bin it.

This will result in wide reaching unnecessary ramifications because one rogue officer lashed out at some cocky (possibly drunk) bloke after a day of enormous violence. He wandered into a riot all other passers by had successfully avoided, in front of officers containing an area, looks to have babbled at them probably to provoke, was pushed, fell over and died later of a heart attack. The entire country erupts with immediate cries of "police brutality" (not you, of course, merely reporting it - but certainly elsewhere). It's as if overreaction is the new British disease. This country has become a part of some weird eunuchverse where we cannot decide which is worse - officers running from protestors as they were just a few weeks ago probablt to avoid any such crap as shown in that video ...or officers dealing with anarchist crap on our streets, armed with only a tickle stick and a heavy hand, for which we can then judge them without mercy in one freak incident.

"Colour me heartless but I have never seen such a fuss made over nothing."

Much as I've critiscised police actions in the past on my blog and others, I have to agree with Alison here.

The left were curiously silent on the Countryside Alliance march, when they complained of the same kind of thing. And their cries of 'police brutality, oh noes!' now rings kind of hollow, to me...

If, once the dust settles, this officer is found to be at fault for unprofessional conduct, then I'm quite sure they will receive the appropriate punishment. But to argue, as some commenters have in blogs and comments, that the police 'murdered' this man is just beyond the pale.

The seriousness of the force used isn't the point, for me. It's what my post said: we need to be able to record the actions of the police so they can be held to account if necessary, for things done on CA marches or swampy idiot-fests. It makes no difference.

I don't mind that Peter and I agree with Julia that the police officer was probably correctly charged with wreckless driving and the footage usefukl. And in this case the officer should get a ticking off about pushing a man. But that's all. The hysteria this is generating is pathetic.

And on the video evidence note, fine provided we can maintain CCTV to record crimes carried out in our streets and the police can use that to prosecute with noone complaining that it is eroding our liberties. Which it isn't.